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My situation is the following: I have a Google Mail email-address and I have been using this address in Thunderbird fetching the emails with POP3 (the emails also remained on the server and where "archived"). In Thunderbird I organized my emails in folders.

Now I want to switch to IMAP (with the same email address), but I want to keep the folder structure I created in Thunderbird.

I could create a 2nd account in Thunderbird that uses IMAP, and then move my folders from the old account to the new one. But the problem is, that Google Mail probably does not recognize that it already has these moved emails in "All Mails". I will probably end up with two copies of every email.

Does someone has good idea how to deal with that problem?

Thank you!

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From my understanding of IMAP vs POP3, when you access your email account with IMAP, it's like accessing your email through a web interface -- you just have access to your emails so you don't have to download them all whereas with POP3, if you started up a new email client with POP3, it would start downloading every single email that you still had on the mail server (which could be thousands).

With POP3 you download all of the emails and they're stored locally on your machine. In your case, the folders that you've set up are only local on to your machine. If you were to connect to gmail through imap, there wouldn't be any different folders (or inboxes, if you prefer) unless you created the inboxes online.

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  • Yes right, and my question was: How can I synchronize my unsorted emails on Google Mails with my local Thunderbird POP3 account, so that my emails on Google Mails also have that same folder structure? :)
    – tsauerwein
    Apr 11, 2010 at 20:04

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